Certainly, the strangest - and most wonderful - was that I wasn't alone. It seemed that other people were getting a sexual frisson from corporal punishment, giving and/or receiving. Or a bit of both.
I have to say that it made me feel a lot less uncomfortable about some of the thoughts that crossed my mind. I decided that getting all hot and bothered about getting my bottom all hot and bothered made no sense and I vowed to stop giving myself a hard time about it.
How old was I when this revelatory moment happened? Well, I was somewhere between 22 and 23, would you believe.
But I'm taking you back to a pre-internet age. Today, a young person with even a hint of spanko spirit can Google and discover all there is to know about TTWD, but in 1989 the red-bottomed facts of life were far harder to discover.
What my hometown didn't have were the sort of newspaper shops that sold porn magazines. In London, the top shelf in my ordinary street's newsagent was full of naughty mags and in among them were copies of Janus, Roue, and the like.
I didn't do more than look out of the corner of my eye at that self (which I couldn't have reached even if I'd been brave enough to try). But it was pretty clear from the slightly ambiguous cover images that some of the magazines there were about spanking.
Janus covers were the ones that really caught my eye. I'm sure that the guy who owned the shop noticed my blushes when I was taking a peep at Janus (or a furtive look at a copy of Blushes) and had me sussed.
Dana Kane touched on the idea of a spanko good old days recently and questioned when that might have been - pre-interent, or post-internet. Personally, I say it's defintiely now. It was only after the internet that the content of that top shelf became available to me because I never had the confidence to buy one of those magazines.
The other London discovery that took me by surprise was that all of the city's phone boxes were full of cards selling sexual services - and it was pretty clear from the pictures that red bottoms were a significant part of the exchange. Ever the social historian, Richard Windsor had the good sense to collect some and save at least a few for posterity.
The phone people would turn up and rip down the cards and almost straight away someone would arrive and new cards would go up to replace them. As a cub reporter I had to use public phones just about every day and found those cards very distracting.
